Masters Of War

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain. You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins. How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul. And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.------- Bob Dylan 1963

While President Salih licks his wounds abroad, Yemen's protest movement is establishing its presence in the capital city, hoping to bridge the country's divide. The revolutionaries -- for now -- live in tents.

What started as a sit-in has turned into an experment in democratic society. In the last four months, between 3,000 and 4,000 tents have been pitched in the streets of the university district in the Yemeni capital Sana'a. The tent city includes pharmacies and a makeshift hospital, four daily newspapers, auditoriums, a garden and hastily constructed cement memorials for the martyrs.

It is a city of citizens, a taste of what Yemen could become, a concrete utopia made of tarps, pallets, satellite dishes and a hodgepodge of power cables the protesters have audaciously connected to the grid in the ancient city. There is a "diplomats' tent" and a tent for actors; there are daily poetry readings and demonstrations; there is even a prison.

The prison is a bone of contention. Riem al-Gaifi is a 22-year-old computer science student who has been living in the tent city with her mother and her four sisters from the very start. "Does our revolution need a prison?" she asks. Robespierre, Trotsky and Fidel Castro once faced the same question.

"No," says Riem al-Gaifi. To voice her disapproval, she intends to stage a protest today against the security committee of her own protest movement.

Soldiers who had joined the revolution arrested some of her friends. "This is the old Yemen," she says. "There are groups in our midst that are very well-organized and want to control everything. But we are the future." She pastes a flyer to a wall. It reads: "Our tribe is called Yemen. Our party is called Yemen. Our faith is called Yemen."

A Capital on Standby

For the past three weeks, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been in a military hospital in Saudi Arabia, recovering from the wounds he sustained in a bomb attack. No one knows when he will return, or whether he will return at all.

The political situation hangs in the balance. The most recent street fighting between pro-regime units and militias loyal to tribal leader Sadiq al-Ahmar left its mark in the burned-out government buildings and walls pockmarked with gunshots, and everyone is scared stiff that it could have been a sign of a looming civil war. Sana'a residents are said to have half a million Kalashnikovs tucked away in their closets, and yet the city is surprisingly calm. Many shops are closed; so are the schools. Everything is on standby, now that much of the city's public activity has shifted to the streets around the university.

The tent city on Tahrir Square in Cairo lasted five weeks. The tent city in Sana'a has been up for almost five months, long enough to have its own street names: "Tunisia Street," "Cairo Street," "Street of Justice."

"Tell him it was predetermined!" a soldier, his left cheek filled with khat leaves, the mild narcotic commonly chewed in Yemen, says to the interpreter. Then he takes a sip of water and spits a stream of greenish liquid into a metal bucket.

Pictures of the fallen, drawn in white paint, caricatures of the president and posters by newly formed groups are everywhere, groups with names like "Revolution English Club" and "Happy Yemen." Every larger tent seems to have an Internet hookup. Apple vendors push carts through the crowd, while other vendors sell revolutionary souvenirs and khat leaves in plastic bags. Two men hold each other's hands, dancing to a cheerful melody and singing: "We give every drop of blood / We give our sons…"

The scene is a mixture of partying and adult-education events, outdoor festivals and religious meetings. Signs reading "Islam loves cleanliness" are affixed to some tents. A macabre-looking puppet, headless and dressed in a suit, dangles high above the tent city.

A group of women wearing full-body veils walks onto a stage. One woman holds a microphone and speaks through her niqab, a piece of thin material covering her mouth, about labor laws in the provincial cities. Her voice can be heard throughout the neighborhood.

The tent city is also a city of women. Aisha al-Sanit, a teacher at the Turkish school, says she has found the courage to speak on a stage for the first time in her life, and that she feels respected. "I felt freedom here with my feet," she says.

Will anti-nuclear protests, like this one held ahead of an important vote in parliament in Berlin on Thursday, become less common now that Germany is abandoning the atom?

It's official: Germany's "Energy Revolution" has begun. The country's parliament on Thursday passed a series of laws that will push forward the phase-out of nuclear plants and promote renewable energies. The world's fourth-largest industrial nation is scheduled to be nuclear-free by 2022, but will its reliance on fossil fuels increase?

Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag, passed a historic package of laws Thursday that commits the nation -- once and for all -- to a phase-out of nuclear power by 2022. The step is unprecedented in Europe, and it marks the final act in a decades-long political drama that began with a grassroots anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s, which gave rise to the German Green Party.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has led the charge against nuclear power only since March, but the Bundestag this morning voted overwhelmingly to close Germany's remaining nine active plants according to a fixed, 11-year schedule. The vote was 513:79, with eight abstentions. Many of the "no" votes came from the Left Party, which argued for a swifter timeline.

'Malice, Calumny, Insult and Defamation'

A nuclear phase-out plan was first approved a decade ago, under a previous government consisting of Social Democrats and Greens, but Chancellor Angela Merkel's more conservative coalition had retracted the plan last year -- granting some nuclear plants another 14 years of life. She quickly reversed course after the accident at Japan's Fukushima reactors in March.

The reversal is remarkable for a leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, who are considered close to the German nuclear lobby. But the center-left Social Democrats and Greens have been uncomfortable with the recent attention focused on Merkel, since the phase-out was originally their idea.

Sigmar Gabriel, a former environmental minister for the Social Democrats, railed on Thursday that his party and the Greens had suffered nothing but "malice, calumny, insult, and defamation" from conservatives for the older phase-out plan.

He accused Merkel's government of opportunism, repeating the common criticism that her reversal was a desperate political response to the general unpopularity of nuclear power among German voters.

Economics Minister Philipp Rösler, who is head of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party and also deputy chancellor, said Gabriel's criticism "lacked credibility." A previous economics minister, Michael Glos, of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats, declared he would not vote for the phase-out at all. "There are a number of reasons why I cannot agree to this," he said, but the main reason, he claimed, was that an end to nuclear power would mean a domestic revival of coal.

The end of nuclear power would force Germany to use more fossil fuels, he argued, "because the development of renewable energies won't be fast enough."

The Greening of Germany

Thursday's package of laws, however, commits Germany to an ambitious green-energy course. By 2020 the national fraction of power drawn from renewable sources -- solar, wind, biomass, etc. -- will have to double from today's 17 to 35 percent. Government subsidies for water power and geothermal energy will be increased, but support for solar, biomass, and land-based wind energy will fall.

Part of the government strategy is to allow for a huge expansion of wind turbines on the North Sea -- some 25,000 megawatts' worth of new offshore wind power will have to be developed by 2030. Germany will also need a larger supergrid to move the current from the north to growing cities, like Munich, in the south. For that the new laws call for the addition of some 3,600 kilometers to the country's "energy Autobahn" of high-capacity power lines.

The package also includes tax incentives to renovate buildings erected before 1995, so they meet modern heating and insulation standards. Germany has already committed to a European Union goal of slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent before 2020.

Merkel has said she would prefer that energy providers not buy nuclear power from neighboring countries like France in order to make up the shortfall after 2022. By this September the Federal Network Agency, which oversees German energy markets, will decide whether one of the eight nuclear plants already closed in recent months should be kept ready on a "cold reserve" basis, to ease bottlenecks in the national energy supply.

Humanism has little place in U.S. global affairs these days when government acts as the enforcement arm of capitalism-run-amok.

Especially since WWII, Washington has habitually aligned itself with the goals of U.S. corporations to dominate. In Latin America and elsewhere, it has funded armies of goons that harass, batter, jail, and murder labor leaders and their allies. In Colombia, labor organizers that call a strike put their lives at risk. It's a veritable shooting gallery where trade unionists are targets.

In Iraq, writes Noam Chomsky in “Interventions”(City Lights Books), the occupying forces broke into union offices, arrested leaders, and enforced Saddam Hussein's antilabor laws. Union leaders were killed under mysterious circumstances. Concessions went to bitterly anti-union U.S. firms. New oil contracts went to firms whose executives were personal friends of President George W. Bush.

At home, U.S. corporations---which exhibit zero loyalty to their employees and to the cities that gave them all those tax breaks to locate---put profits first even if it means stripping those cities of their plants; even if it means throwing thousands of loyal staffers out of work; even if it means cheating taxpayers by relocating their headquarters' offshore; even if it means hiring cheap foreign labor.

“We are seeing the Financial Elite of America waging class warfare against the ordinary working men and women of this country who have made it what it is today,” says University of Illinois international legal authority Francis Boyle.

And Noam Chomsky points in Imperial Ambitions (Metropolitan Books): “Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all.”

At the same time, he adds, “the general population has gone through 30 years(1975-2005) of either stagnation or decline in real wages, with people working longer hours with fewer benefits. I don't think there's been a period like this in American history.” Meanwhile, corporations harvest record profits.

As sociologist James Petras of Binghamton University points out in his “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire,”(Clarity): “Today, over 50 percent of the top 500 US (multinational corporations) MNCs earn over half their profits from overseas operations...This tendency will accentuate as US MNCs relocate almost all their operations, including manufacturing, design and execution. They will employ low tech and high tech employees in their pursuit for competitive advantages and high rates of profits.” (This is not to say that some MNCs aren't building schools, housing, highways, and public facilities near their overseas plants.)

Petras noted that Mexican President Carlos Salinas(1988-94) “privatized over 110 public enterprises, opened the borders to subsidized US agricultural exports---ruining over 1.5-million...farmers and peasants---and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. His policies facilitated the US takeover of Mexico's retail trade, real estate, agriculture, industry, banking and communications sectors. Similar patterns of foreign takeovers were evident throughout the region, especially in Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia where lucrative gas, oil and mining firms were privatized and sold to foreign investors.”

“Oil and energy companies secured exploration rights via corruption by buying out entire ministries in Russia, Nigeria, Angola, Bolivia and Venezuela in the 1990s,” Petras writes. “Securing a toehold in any economic sector of China to exploit cheap labor requires the MNC to pay off a small army of government officials. This is more than compensated by the regime's enforcement of a cheap labor regime, repression of labor discontent and the imposition of state-controlled pro-business 'labor unions.'”

Everywhere one looks, Imperial America is training police departments of friendly dictators in brutal suppression techniques if and when the peasantry demands a bigger share of the pie which they baked. Journalist William Blum in “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press), U.S. armed forces “are being deployed in well over 100 countries in every part of the world,” countries Washington supplies “with sizable amounts of highly lethal military equipment, and training their armed forces and police in the brutal arts...”

It's no coincidence that as arms become America's No. 1 export, civilian jobs are going down the tubes. Columbia University economist Seymour Melman, interviewed in the Feb., 1992, issue of The Progressive, argued because of its vast expenditures for war the U.S. was “losing millions of productive jobs” in the civilian sector to foreign firms.

“The U.S. economy is in dramatic disrepair compared to Germany and Japan. By concentrating capital on civilian purposes for 45 years they've emerged as the true victors of the Cold War,” Melman said.

More recently, Chomsky wrote: “U.S. military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for over 60 percent of the world total.”

The record of history shows the White House has used CIA and Pentagon muscle to attack nations whose officials wouldn't play ball in the capitalist league. President Eisenhower gave the green light for the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran. President Kennedy attempted to overthrow Cuba, but failed, in 1961; President Nixon succeeded in overthrowing the legally elected president of Chile in 1973; and President Reagan funded the Contras to wage war against the leftist Sandinistas of Nicaragua.

“Because of Red Scare anxieties,” wrote James Carroll in “House of War”(Houghton Mifflin), “Americans would uncritically accept the maturing of an economic system (capitalism) that, in its effect if not its structure, condemned most of the world to crushing impoverishment. The humane aspects of Marx's critique of capitalism would not be reckoned with in the United States, with dangerous consequences that define the ever more polarized twenty-first century.”

When Cold War presidents gazed upon the world, all they saw was Red. War hero Jimmy Doolittle, who led the first U.S. air strike against Japan in 1942, later as chairman of a special task force reported to President Dwight Eisenhower that the U.S. “must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may be necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.” That, of course, is precisely what happened. The end began to justify any means. The Pentagon even uses its listening devices to steal business information to give U.S. firms an edge over foreign ones.

Fear-mongering American politicians claimed that if just one country went Communist, all its neighbors would topple like dominoes. For decades, the U.S. subsidized anti-Communist Japanese politicians; the CIA secretly lined the pockets of mullahs and ayatollahs in Iran; and the Pentagon plunged recklessly into civil wars such as in Viet Nam using overwhelming force and violence. Ironically, at home the Justice Department, responding to the “Red Scare,” persecuted, tried, and jailed leaders of the U.S. Communist Party, for allegedly advocating the same strategies the Pentagon was actuallyemploying on a massive scale the world over.

Yet all the Pentagon's costly armaments designed to topple Red regimes proved less effective than the protests of the non-violent disciples of Gandhi, such as Solidarity labor union's Lech Walesa in Poland, who led the break out of the Soviet orbit. In Russia, President Mikhail Gorbachev, the advocate of Glasnost, or openness, could see that Soviet-brand Communism was failing his people and began to make changes that permitted private ownership of business.

Similarly, strong-arm capitalism American-style today needs to be transformed. Starting wars to force other nations to privatize natural resources they would prefer to keep under public control is both reprehensible and criminal.

In his treatise “On Human Work” in 1981, Pope John Paul II called for “the primacy of the person over things and of human labour over capital as a whole.” Workers must be paid fairly, allowed to form unions and strike for self-improvement and treated with dignity and respect. Let it be. #

Sherwood Ross is director of the Anti-War News Service from Coral Gables, Fla. He was active in the civil rights movement and later as a wire service columnist covering workplace issues. To contribute to his news service or comment, reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com.

Although she didn't leave a scratch on his brutal crackdown, Hillary Clinton recently launched a metaphysical barrage at Syria’s strongman, Bashar al-Assad. In an op-ed to Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat, the Secretary of State boldly declared, “There is no going back in Syria.”

“President Assad’s violent crackdown has shattered his claims to be a reformer,” Clinton wrote on June 17th. “For years, he has offered pledges and promises, but all that matters are his actions. A speech, no matter how dutifully applauded by regime apologists, will not change the reality that the Syrian people, despite being told they live in a republic, have never had the opportunity to freely elect their leaders. These citizens want to see a real transition to democracy and a government that honors their universal rights and aspirations.”

Although her every word applies to Yemen’s revolution, never has Ali Abdullah Saleh been flayed like this. Only six months ago a smiling Clinton shook his hand in Sana’a, wrongly believing that she had diffused a political crisis sparked by Saleh’s attempt to remove term limits. Now Yemen’s embattled president of 33 years is laid up in a Saudi hospital after suffering critical injuries from a June 3rd assassination attempt. Yet the White House and State Department refuse to debate “hypotheticals” surrounding his health, secrecy that has amplified the revolution’s suspicions. In the meantime the Obama administration continues to urge Saleh’s ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) to transfer power to itself.

This illegitimate process would flagrantly violate Yemen’s revolution. Drafted by U.S. and Saudi officials through the proxy Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Obama administration’s “power transfer” is all talk and no action. In Voice Of America’s own words, “The initiative would create a transition government wherein 50 percent of the positions would go to the GPC and 50 percent to the JMP [Joint Meeting Parties].”

"The youth want to coordinate and create a transition council but we are trying to involve all political factions in the process other than the ruling party," said Waseem Qirshi, spokesperson for the revolution’s Organizing Committee.

The vast schism between U.S. policy in Syria and Yemen is perceptible throughout Clinton’s condemnation of al-Assad. Targeting his belief that he “can act with impunity because the international community hopes for his cooperation on other issues,” Clinton hoped to awaken the delusional dictator by warning “he and his regime are certainly not indispensable.” Perhaps al-Assad isn't responding because these words ring across Yemen’s diverse landscape, where Saleh has abused Washington’s political cover and military aid to divide and conquer his opposition. Clinton encourages Syrians to “insist on accountability” in full knowledge that the GCC is shielding Saleh’s regime from human rights abuses committed with U.S. arms. With Zine El Abidine Ben Ali sentenced to 35 years in absentia, Hosni Mubarak facing trial, NATO warplanes searching for Muammar Gaddafi’s headquarters, and international condemnation raining down on al-Assad, the White House continues to offer Saleh and his family an extraction point that leaves his regime in power.

Al-Assad must envy his fellow autocrat.

Not that Saleh's family is prepared to leave office. Contrary to the Obama administration’s efforts to portray Vice President Abd al-Rahman Mansur al-Hadi as “acting” president, Saleh’s son Ahmed believes he’s entitled to his father’s palace. The White House has avoided spearheading UN sanctions because the same familial commanders targeted in Syria operate as Pentagon liaisons between Saleh’s regime. U.S. counter-terror support flows into his security apparatus despite ongoing violence against peaceful protesters, and 18 drone strikes have been reported in the southern governorates since June 1st. According to GPC officials, 85% of these operations targeted local militants over al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Local medical officials disagree, claiming that half of the 200+ casualties they’ve treated are civilians.

General Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, Saleh's ex-fist in the north, isn’t a popular figure despite his early defection. However he isn’t afraid to say what everyone else is thinking: “As long as this regime is in power, Al Qaeda will continue to exist in Yemen. Now, counterterrorism cooperation is based on material cooperation only. It is for the exchange of funds. How much will you give me if I can kill a person for you?”

Rather than correct this meltdown in U.S. foreign policy, President Barack Obama dispatched Jeffrey Feltman to Sana’a with orders to renew support for the GCC’s proposal: “We continue to believe that an immediate, peaceful and orderly transition is in the best interest of the Yemeni people.” At least the White House is inching forward in Syria; the administration’s response to Yemen’s revolution remains stubbornly immovable from five months ago. State Department officials clung to the GCC's proposal throughout the past weeks of upheaval, indicating complete disarray within Clinton’s domain. Feltman, the Assistant Secretary of State for Mideast Affairs, didn’t waste time validating this reality.

"We strongly condemn all forms of violence and terrorism,” he said after meeting with Hadi and Ahmed Saleh.

The White House should look outside its windows more often. Saba state media highlighted Feltman’s visit as a show of support for his regime, and most Yemenis believe that Saleh is the primary source of violence and terrorism. They hold his regime responsible for inducing shortages in fuel and commodities to starve the revolution. Nor are millions of protesters marching in favor of the GCC’s proposal, but in opposition to it. Protests turned decisively anti-American and anti-Saudi over the weekend, as popular coalitions boycotted Feltman’s visit “because of the U.S.’s negative attitude against the revolution in Yemen.”

Whether Saleh signs the GCC’s proposal or not, Yemen’s streets will witness mass counter-demonstrations by its revolutionaries “until all political forces surrender to our demands.”

The time is past due for America to convert its negative talk into positive action. If the Obama administration truly supports Yemen’s revolutionaries, it will void the GCC’s proposal and engage the popular opposition directly. Negotiations between Hadi and the JMP have failed to extend beyond the security and economic crisis, excuses to stall for time. The GPC even accused the JMP of orchestrating these acts, particularly blocking roads and blowing up oil pipelines. Although Hadi announced a "four-point plan" to restore the situation to “normal,” Saba explicitly, “denied reports that those meetings had discussed other political issues, confirming the political issues can be discussed after President Ali Abdullah Saleh returns home.”

Another stall tactic, as usual.

U.S. policy needs its own four-point plan to stabilize Yemen without compromising support for the revolution. First, Saleh’s status must be clarified and he must be detained upon a potential return to Sana’a (so must his family of commanders). Open conflict is inevitable if he’s left to his own schemes and Washington cannot obstruct the delivery of justice. Second, the GCC’s proposal must be scrapped or rewritten to unequivocally favor Yemen’s revolutionaries, who demand a transitional council of their own choosing. The JMP is contemplating a national coalition that would include the youth, Houthis and Southern Movement, but endorsing the GCC bled the last of its credibility. Instead off fomenting a power struggle between the GPC and JMP, the Obama administration must break from Saudi Arabia's counter-revolution and support Yemen’s popular opposition.

Third, pro-democracy protesters intend to author a new constitution - unlike U.S. calls to maintain “constitutional legitimacy” through Hadi - and an election must adhere to the revolution’s demands. The GCC’s “30-60” initiative stands for a 30-day power transfer followed by a 60-day transition, a rapid pace that the youth cannot keep up with organizationally. Designed to favor the GPC, U.S. officials also lobbied for an election before Ramadan (August 1st) because they “didn’t want to lose a month against AQAP.” Yemen’s next election could be its most important in modern history, and must take place on the revolution’s time-line of six to twelve months.

Finally, until these terms are granted, escalating military operations must cease in southern Yemen. Already exploited by Saleh’s regime to target local, non-jihadist militias, U.S. air-strikes are inflicting more damage on Yemen's political system than AQAP. Connections with Ahmed’s murderous Republican Guard and other security units must be severed as well. This ceasefire must transition into a proportional increase in humanitarian aid, as the country requires emergency assistance.

There is no going back to Saleh’s regime. These steps are the first of a thousand to winning the trust of Yemen’s people, the only real safeguard against al-Qaeda.

Audacity of Hope will join Freedom Flotilla II to break siege on Gaza.

By Ramzy Baroud
United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made a series of stern and fiery statements recently, giving the impression that war is somehow on us once again. Oddly, Clinton's sudden reappearance on the Middle East diplomacy scene was triggered by the brave attempts of peace activists to break the siege on Gaza.
In recent months, as Arab nations settled old scores with their insufferable dictators, US foreign policy started taking a backseat. Attempts at swaying Arab revolts teetered between bashful diplomatic efforts to sustain US interests - as was the case with Yemen - and military intervention, as in Libya, which is still being marketed to the US public as a humanitarian intervention, as opposed to the war it actually is.
The indecisiveness and double-standards on display are hardly new.
The US's stance during the Tunisian popular revolution ranged between complete lack of interest (when the protests began brewing in December 2010), to sudden enthusiasm for freedom and democracy (when the revolts led to the ousting of longtime president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14).
The same foreign policy pendulum repeatedly swung both ways during the Egyptian revolution. The US political definitions of Hosni Mubarak shifted from that of a friendly leader to that of a loathsome dictator who had to go for the sake of Egyptian democracy.
It took Tunisians 28 days to overthrow their leader, and Egyptians 18 days to outset Mubarak. During these periods, US foreign policy in the two countries - and the Middle East as a whole - seemed impossible to delineate in any concrete statements. Clinton was an emblematic figure in this diplomatic discrepancy.
Now Clinton is back, speaking in a lucid language which leaves no room for misinterpretation. When it comes to the security and interests of Israel - as opposed to those of the entire Middle East region and all its nations - Clinton, like other top American officials, leaves no room for error. Israel will always come first.
Clinton's forceful language was triggered by the decision of humanitarian activists from over 20 countries to travel to Gaza in a symbolic gesture to challenge the Israeli blockade of one of the poorest regions on earth. The 500 peace activists on board 10 boats will include musicians, writers, Nobel Laureates, Holocaust survivors and members of parliament.
"We think that it's not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke action by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves," Clinton told reporters on June 23. The foreboding language offers another blank check to Israel, giving it permission to do as it pleases.
If Israel repeated the same scenario it used to intercept and punish activists abroad the first flotilla on May 31, 2010 - killing nine activists in the Mavi Marmara - then it would constitute another act of "self-defense", according to Clinton's avant-garde rationale.
Responding to Clinton's comments, Irish member of parliament Paul Murphy told the Irish Examiner on June 24: "It is not true that we will be entering Israeli waters. We will be sailing through Gaza waters." He added, "Clinton's comments are disgraceful. She has essentially given the green light to Israeli Defense Forces to use violence against participants in the flotilla."
Indeed, Israeli diplomats will be utilizing Clinton's advanced verbal and political support for the Israeli action in every platform available to them.
According to Clinton, the entire business with the flotillas is unnecessary. "We don't think it's useful or helpful or productive to the people of Gaza," she told reporters in Washington, adding that, "a far better approach is to support the work that's being done through the United Nations".
The UN had already declared the Gaza siege illegal. Various top UN officials have stated this fact repeatedly, and the international body had called on Israel to end the siege. Notable among the many statements was a 34-page report by UN human-rights chief Navi Pillay.
Published on August 14, 2009, the report "accused Israel of violating the rules of warfare with its blockade stopping people and goods from moving in or out of the Gaza Strip", according to the Associated Press.
"The Gaza blockade," Pillay stated, "amounts to collective punishment of civilians, which is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of warfare and occupation". Before the 34 pages could be thoroughly examined, both the US and Israel dismissed the findings. Now Clinton is suddenly urging all interested parties to work through the same institution that her department has repeatedly undermined.
Pillay's report was issued nearly two years ago. Since then, little has been done to remedy the situation and to bring to an end the protracted Palestinian tragedy in Gaza. In fact, The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees has recently put Gaza's unemployment at 45.2%, allegedly among the worst in the world.
The UN report, released on June 14, claimed that unemployment in the first half of 2011 had increased by 3%. Monthly wages were also shown to have declined significantly. It seems the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not only bad, it is progressively worsening.
This time, Clinton is speaking from a power position. As diplomatic pressure from Israel finally dissuaded Turkey from allowing the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) from joining the flotilla, it seems the Mavi Marmara won't be setting sail back to Gaza anytime soon. As if to confirm that the IHH decision was motivated by political pressure, Clinton "spoke to her Turkish counterpart, [Foreign Minister] Ahmet Davutoglu to express her happiness at the announcement" (according to Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News, June 21).
With political victory in mind, the State Department travel warning of June 22 read like a legal disclaimer issued by the Israeli foreign ministry. It warned US citizens to avoid any attempt to reach Gaza by sea. Those who participate in a flotilla risk arrest, prosecution, deportation and a possible 10-year travel ban by Israel.
In a region that is rife with opportunities for political stances - or at least a measurable shift in policy - the US State Department and its chief diplomat have offered nothing but inconsistency and contradiction. Now, thanks to a group of peaceful civil society activists, including many pacifists and elders, the State Department is getting its decisive voice back. And the voice is as atrocious and unprincipled as ever.- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), available on Amazon.com. http://www.palestinechronicle.com/index.php

I’m talking about the 13 minutes of “remarks” on “the way forward in Afghanistan” that President Obama delivered in the East Room of the White House two Wednesday nights ago.

Tell me you weren’t holding your breath wondering whether the 33,000 surge troops he ordered into Afghanistan as 2009 ended would be removed in a 12-month, 14-month, or 18-month span. Tell me you weren’t gripped with anxiety about whether 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, or 15,000 American soldiers would come out this year (leaving either 95,000, 93,000, 88,000, or 83,000 behind)?

You weren’t? Well, if so, you were in good company.

Billed as the beginning of the end of the Afghan War, it should have been big and it couldn’t have been smaller. The patented Obama words were meant to soar, starting with a George W. Bush-style invocation of 9/11 and ending with the usual copious blessings upon this country and our military. But on the evidence, they couldn’t have fallen flatter. I doubt I was alone in thinking that it was like seeing Ronald Reagan on an unimaginably bad day in an ad captioned “It’s never going to be morning again in America.”

Idolator President

If you clicked Obama off that night or let the event slide instantly into your mental trash can, I don’t blame you. Still, the president’s Afghan remarks shouldn’t be sent down the memory hole quite so quickly.

For one thing, while the mainstream media's pundits and talking heads are always raring to discuss his policy remarks, the words that frame them are generally ignored -- and yet the discomfort of the moment can’t be separated from them. So start with this: whether by inclination, political calculation, or some mix of the two, our president has become a rhetorical idolator.

These days he can barely open his mouth without also bowing down before the U.S. military in ways that once would have struck Americans as embarrassing, if not incomprehensible. In addition, he regularly prostrates himself before this country’s special mission to the world and never ceases to emphasize that the United States is indeed an exception among nations. Finally, in a way once alien to American presidents, he invokes God’s blessing upon the military and the country as regularly as you brush your teeth.

Think of these as the triumvirate without which no Obama foreign-policy moment would be complete: greatest military, greatest nation, our God. And in this he follows directly, if awkwardly, in Bush's footsteps.

I wouldn’t claim that Americans had never had such thoughts before, only that presidents didn’t feel required to say them in a mantra-like way just about every time they appeared in public. Sometimes, of course, when you feel a compulsion to say the same things ad nauseam, you display weakness, not strength; you reveal the most fantastic of fantasy worlds, not a deeper reality.

The president’s recent Afghan remarks were, in this sense, par for the course. As he plugged his plan to bring America’s “long wars” to what he called “a responsible end,” he insisted that “[l]ike generations before, we must embrace America’s singular role in the course of human events.” He then painted this flattering word portrait of us:

“We’re a nation that brings our enemies to justice while adhering to the rule of law, and respecting the rights of all our citizens. We protect our own freedom and prosperity by extending it to others. We stand not for empire, but for self-determination... and when our union is strong no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach... we are bound together by the creed that is written into our founding documents, and a conviction that the United States of America is a country that can achieve whatever it sets out to accomplish.”

I know, I know. You’re wondering whether you just mainlined into a Sarah Palin speech and your eyes are glazing over. But hang in there, because that’s just a start. For example, in an Obama speech of any sort, what America’s soldiers never lack is the extra adjective. They aren’t justsoldiers, but “our extraordinary men and women in uniform.” They aren’t just Americans, but “patriotic Americans.” (Since when did an American president have to describe American soldiers as, of all things, “patriotic”?) And in case you missed the point that, in their extraordinariness and their outsized patriotism they are better than other Americans, he made sure to acknowledge them as the ones we “draw inspiration from.”

In a country that now “supports the troops” with bumper-sticker fervor but pays next to no attention to the wars they fight, perhaps Obama is simply striving to be the premier twenty-first-century American. Still, you have to wonder what such presidential fawning, omnipresent enough to be boilerplate, really represents. The strange thing is we hear this sort of thing all the time. And yet no one ever comments on it.

Oh, and let’s not forget that no significant White House moment ends these days without the president bestowing God’s blessing on the globe’s most extraordinary nation and its extraordinary fighters, or as he put it in his Afghan remarks: “May God bless our troops. And may God bless the United States of America.”

The day after he revealed his drawdown plan to the nation, the president traveled to Ft. Drum in New York State to thank soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division for their multiple deployments to Afghanistan. Before those extraordinary and patriotic Americans, he quite naturally doubled down.

Summoning another tic of this presidential moment (and of the Bush one before it), he told them that they were part of “the finest fighting force in the world.” Even that evidently seemed inadequate, so he upped the hyperbole. “I have no greater job,” he told them, “nothing gives me more honor than serving as your commander in chief. To all of you who are potentially going to be redeployed, just know that your commander in chief has your back... God bless you, God bless the United States of America, climb to glory.”

As ever, all of this was overlooked. Nowhere did a single commentator wonder, for instance, whether an American president was really supposed to feel that being commander in chief offered greater “honor” than being president of a nation of citizens. In another age, such a statement would have registered as, at best, bizarre. These days, no one even blinks.

And yet who living in this riven, confused, semi-paralyzed country of ours truly believes that, in 2011, Americans can achieve whatever we set out to accomplish? Who thinks that, not having won a war in memory, the U.S. military is incontestably the finest fighting force now or ever (and on a “climb to glory” at that), or that this country is at present specially blessed by God, or that ours is a mission of selfless kindheartedness on planet Earth?

Obama’s remarks have no wings these days because they are ever more divorced from reality. Perhaps because this president in fawning mode is such an uncomfortable sight, and because Americans generally feel so ill-at-ease about their relationship to our wars, however, such remarks are neither attacked nor defended, discussed nor debated, but as if by some unspoken agreement simply ignored.

Here, in any case, is what they aren’t: effective rallying cries for a nation in need of unity. Here’s what they may be: strange, defensive artifacts of an imperial power in visible decline, part of what might be imagined as the Great American Unraveling. But hold that thought a moment. After all, the topic of the president’s remarks was Afghanistan.

The Unreal War

If Obama framed his Afghan remarks in a rhetoric of militarized super-national surrealism, then what he had to say about the future of the war itself was deceptive in the extreme -- not lies perhaps, but full falsehoods half told. Consider just the two most important of them: that his “surge” consisted only of 33,000 American troops and that “by next summer,” Americans are going to be so on the road to leaving Afghanistan that it isn’t funny.

Unfortunately, it just ain’t so. First of all, the real Obama surge was minimally almost 55,000 and possibly 66,000 troops, depending on how you count them. When he came into office in January 2009, there were about 32,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Another 11,000 had been designated to go in the last days of the Bush administration, but only departed in the first Obama months. In March 2009, the president announced his own “new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” and dispatched 21,700 more troops. Then, in December 2009 in a televised speech to the nation from West Point, he announced that another 30,000 would be going. (With “support troops,” it turned out to be 33,000.)

In other words, in September 2012, 14 months from now, only about half the actual troop surge of the Obama years will have been withdrawn. In addition, though seldom discussed, the Obama “surge” was hardly restricted to troops. There was a much ballyhooed “civilian surge” of State Department and aid types that more than tripled the “civilian” effort in Afghanistan. Their drawdown was recently addressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but only in the vaguest of terms.

Then there was a major surge of CIA personnel (along with U.S. special operations forces), and there’s no indication whatsoever that anyone in Washington intends reductions there, or in the drone surge that went with it. As a troop drawdown begins, CIA agents, those special ops forces, and thedrones are clearly slated to remain at or beyond a surge peak.

All of this makes mincemeat of the idea that we are in the process of ending the Afghan war. I know the president said, “Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.” And that was a foggy enough formulation that you might be forgiven for imagining more or less everything will be over “by 2014” -- which, by the way, means not January 1st, but December 31st of that year.

If what we know of U.S. plans in Afghanistan plays out, however, December 31, 2014, will be the date for the departure of the last of the full Obama surge of 64,000 troops. In other words, almost five years after Obama entered office, more than 13 years after the Bush administration launched its invasion, we could find ourselves back to or just below something close to Bush-era troop levels. Tens of thousands of U.S. forces would still be in Afghanistan, some of them “combat troops” officially relabeled (as in Iraq) for less warlike activity. All would be part of an American “support” mission that would include huge numbers of “trainers” for the Afghan security forces and also U.S. special forces operatives and CIA types engaged in “counterterror” activities in the country and region.

The U.S. general in charge of training the Afghan military recently suggested that his mission wouldn’t be done until 2017 (and no one who knows anything about the country believes that an effective Afghan Army will be in place then either). In addition, although the president didn’t directly mention this in his speech, the Obama administration has been involved in quiet talks with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to nail down a “strategic partnership” agreement that would allow American troops, spies, and air power to hunker down as “tenants” on some of the giant bases we've built. There they would evidently remain for years, if not decades (as some reports have it).

In other words, on December 31, 2014, if all goes as planned, the U.S. will be girding for years more of wildly expensive war, even if in a slimmed down form. This is the reality, as American planners imagine it, behind the president’s speech.

Overstretched Empire

Of course, it’s not for nothing that we regularly speak of the best laid plans going awry, something that applies doubly, as in Afghanistan, to the worst laid plans. It’s increasingly apparent that our disastrous wars are, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry recently admitted, “unsustainable.” After all, just the cost of providing air conditioning to U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan -- $20 billion a year -- is more than NASA’s total budget.

Yes, despite Washington's long lost dreams of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East, some of its wars there are still being planned as if for a near-eternity, while others are being intensified. Those wars are still fueled by overblown fears of terrorism; encouraged by a National Security Complex funded to the tune of more than $1.2 trillion annually by an atmosphere of permanent armed crisis; and run by a military that, after a decade of not-so-creative destruction, can’t stop doing what it knows how to do best (which isn't winning a war).

Though Obama claims that the United States is no empire, all of this gives modern meaning to the term “overstretched empire.” And it’s not really much of a mystery what happens to overextemded imperial powers that find themselves fighting “little” wars they can’t win, while their treasuries head south.

The growing unease in Washington about America’s wars reflects a dawning sense of genuine crisis, a sneaking suspicion even among hawkish Republicans that they preside ineffectually over a great power in precipitous decline.

Think, then, of the president’s foreign-policy-cum-war speeches as ever more unconvincing attempts to cover the suppurating wound that is Washington’s global war policy. If you want to take the temperature of the present crisis, you can do it through Obama’s words. The less they ring true, the more discordant they seem in the face of reality, the more he fawns and repeats his various mantras, the more uncomfortable he makes you feel, the more you have the urge to look away, the deeper the crisis.

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